12

The of Community and

the Pohttcs of Difference
Iris Marion Young
Prologue
. The ideal. of I suggest in this chapter, privileges unity over
11;nmed1acy mediation, sympathy over recognition of the
of one s understand mg of others from their point of view. Commu-
mty 1s an understandable dream, expressing a desire for selves that are
transparent to one another, relationships of mutual identification, social
and comfort. The dream is understandable, but politically prob-
I argue, because those motivated by it will tend to suppress
differences themselves or implicitly to exclude from their political
groups persons with whom they do not identify. The vision of small, face-
to-face, decentralized units that this ideal promotes, moreover, is an
unrealistic vision for transfonnative politics in mass urban society.
I did not write this essay only with feminists in mind. The commitments
and concerns that motivate it, however, derive in large measure from
my experience with feminist groups and discussions. On the one hand,
feminists have been paradigm exponents of the ideal of community I
criticize. On the other hand, feminist discussions of the importance of
attending to differences among women are a primary political impetus for
my seeking to criticize that ideal.
Dominant strains of feminism have expressed the ideal of community
I criticize on two levels. First, we have often expected our political
groups to fulfill our desire for community as against the alienation and
individualism we find hegemonic in capitalist patriarchal society. Thus,
I am gr11eful to David Alexander. Ann Ferguson, Roger Gottlieb, Peter Manicas. Peter
Onuf, Lucius Qutlaw, Michael Ryan, Richard SchmiH, Ruth Smith, Tom Wartenburg,
llld Hugh Wilder for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
111e Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference / 301
we have looked for mutual identification and mutual affirmation in our
feminist groups, finding conflict or respectful distance suspect. We have
had understandable reasons for seeking unity and mutual identification in
?ur groups. For most of us, feminism has been more than just a politics,
lt has also been a personal and spiritual quest for self-knowledge and
affirmation. Insofar as feminist groups have been impelled by a
desire for closeness and mutual identification, however, our political
may have been limited. Deconstruction, which I rely on in
this chapter f?r n:1Y critique of community, shows that a desire for unity
or wholeness m discourse generates borders, dichotomies, and exclusions.
I suggest that the desire for mutual identification in social relations gener-
ates exclusions in a similar way. A woman in a feminist group that seeks
to affirm mutual identification will feel and be doubly excluded if by virtue
?f he.r different in race, class, culture, or sexuality she does not
with the others nor they with her. A desire for community in
fem1mst groups, that is, helps reproduce their homogeneity.
Second, on a more general level of political vision, feminists have
developed little in the way of models of political organizing that can serve
as alternatives to interest group bureaucracy, on the one hand, or the small
personalized task group, on the other. Despite our critical attention to
.of the male tradition of political theory, many of us have retained
uncnllcally an anarchist, participatory democratic communitarianism to
express our vision of the ideal society. Indeed, many of us have assumed
that women and feminists can best realize this ideal, because women's
culture is less individualistic and less based in competition than men's
culture, because, we claim, women are psychologically and politically
more. ?nented toward care and mutuality. I argue in this chapter that
cond1t1ons of modem urban mass society require conceiving an alternative
vision of the unoppressive society.
This . alternative must a of difference. Although l derive
the logical cntique of the unity of community from
postmodernist philosophy, I take the concrete political vision of inexhaust-
ible lar:ge part from feminism. Discussions among us of
the ?ppress1ve of assumptions of the unity of women, and
the importance ?f to specific differences among women,
the begmnmgs of. a beyond community. I imagine the
pohtacal structure and social relations that have evolved in the National
'Y 's Studies to offer glimmers of the openness to unas-
s1mtlated otherness that m the last section of this chapter I define as a
nonn for the unoppressive city.
Radical theorists and activists often appeal to an ideal of community as
an alternative to the oppression and exploitation that they argue, character-
izes capitalist patriarchal society. Such appeals often do not explicitly
302 I lris Marion Young
the of the concept of community but rather tend to
o e an value. more rarely do those who invoke an ideal
?tf as . an capitalist patriarchal society ask what
hp or 1mphes, or what 1t means concretely to institute a society
t at e!'"bod1es raise a number of critical questions about the
meanmg, implications, and practical import of the ideal
of community.
As in all conceptual in this case there is no universally
shared concept of .community, only particular articulations that overlap,
or sit acute angles to one another.
1
I will rely on the
and expos1t1ons ?fa .of for examples of concep-
tuahzat1ons about community as a pohhcal ideal. All these writers share a
critique of liberal individualist social ontology, and most think democratic
socialism the of social organization. I claim acceptance for
my analysis only w1thm this general field of political discourse, although I
suspect that much of the conceptual structure I identify applies to an ideal
of community that might be appealed to by more conservative or liberal
writers.
I criticize the notion of community on both philosophical and practical
grounds. I argue that the ideal of community participates in what Derrida
calls the metaphysics of presence and Adorno calls the logic of identity,
a metaphysics that denies difference. The ideal of community presumes
subjects can understand one another as they understand themselves. It
thus denies the difference between subjects. The desire for community
relies on the same desire for social wholeness and identification that
underlies racism and ethnic chauvinism on the one hand and political
sectarianism on the other.
Insofar as the ideal of community entails promoting a model of face-
to-face relations as best, it devalues and denies difference in the form of
temporal and spatial distancing. The ideal of a society consisting of
decentraJiz.ed face-to-face communities is undesirably utopian in several
ways. It fails to see that alienation and violence are a function .
of mediation of social relations but also can and do exist m face-to-face
relations. It implausibly proposes a society without the city. It fails to
address the political question of the relations among face-to-face commu-
.
The ideal of community, tinalJy, totalizes and detemporalizes its con-
ception of social Jife by setting up an be_tween and
inauthentic social relations. It also detemporahzes its of
social change by positing the desired society as the complete negation of
existing society. It thus provides no understanding of the move fro?1
to Chae that would be rooted in an understanding of the contradictions
and possibilities of existing society.
The Ideal of Communlly and the Politics of Difference I 303
l propose that instead of community as the nonnative ideal of political
emancipation, that radicals should develop a politics of difference. A
model of the unoppressive city offers an understanding of social relations
without domi nation in which persons live together in relations of mediation
among strangers with whom they are not in community.
The Metaphysics of Presence
West.em conceptualization, as expressed both in philosophical wri ting,
other theoretical writing, and quite often everyday speech as well, exhibits
what Derrida calls a logic of identity.
2
This metaphysics consists in a
desire to think things together in a unity, to formulate representation of
a whole, a totality. It seeks the unity of the thinking subject with the object
thought, that the object would be a grasping of the real. The urge to unity
seeks to think everything that is a whole or to describe some ontoJogical
region, such as social life, as a whole, a system. Such totalization need
not be restricted to synchronic conceptualization, moreover. The concep-
tualization of a process teleologically also exhibits the logic of identity,
inasmuch as the end conceptually organizes the process into a unity.
The desire to bring things into unity generates a logic of hierarchical
opposition. Any move to define an identity, a closed totality, always
depends on excluding some elements, separating the pure from the impure.
Bripging particular things under a universal essence, for example, depends
on determining some attribute of particulars as accidental, lying outside
the essence. Any definition or category creates an inside/outside distinc-
tion, and the logic of identity seeks to keep those borders firmly drawn.
In the history of Western thought the metaphysics of presence has created
a vast number of such mutually exclusive oppositions that structure whole
philosophies: subject/object; mind/body, culture/nature, male/female. In
the metaphysical tradition the first of these is elevated over the second
because it designates the unified, the chaotic, unformed, transfonning.
Metaphysical thinking makes distinctions and formulates accounts by
relying on such oppositions, where one side designates the pure, authentic,
good, and the other the impure, inauthentic, bad.
The logic of identity also seeks to understand the subject, the person,
as a self-identical unity. Beginning with Descartes, modem philosophy is
particularly preoccupied with the unity of consciousness and its immediate
presence to itself. The tradition of transcendental philosophy from Des-
cartes through Kant to Husserl conceives the subject as a unity and
an origin, the self-same starting point of thought and meaning, whose
signification is never out of its grasp.
There are two sorts of criticisms Derrida, Adorno, Kristeva, and others
make of the metaphysics of presence. First, its effort to bring things into
304 I ns Manon Young
doomed to failure. The claim to totality asserted by this metaphys-
ics because, as I have already discussed, the process of
totahzmg expels some aspects of the entities. Some of the experi-
enced particulars are expelled to an unaccounted-for "accidental" realm
what Derrida calls the supplement and Adorno call; the addendum.
move to create totality, as the logic of hierarchical opposition shows,
crea!es one, two: inside and outside. The identity or essence sought
receives Its meanmg and purity only by its relation to its outside. What
. Derrida calls the method of deconstruction consists in showing how with a
con_cept or category what it claims to exclude is implicated in it. Dialectical
logic, of course, makes a similar claim. The method of deconstruction,
or what Adorno calls negative dialectic, however, rejects the Hegelian
!11ethod of For Hegelian dialectic is the ultimate totalizer, bring-
mg the oppositions generated by metaphysical logic into ultimate unity
within a totality.
Second, the metaphysics of presence represses or denies difference.
This tenn has come to carry a great deal of meaning in these philosophical
accounts. As I understand it, difference means the irreducible particularity
of entities, which makes it impossible to reduce them to commonness or
bring them into unity without remainder. Such particularity derives from
the contcxtuality of existence, the being of a thing and what is said about
it is a function of its contextual relation to other things. Adorno in particular
contrasts the logic of identity with entities in their particularity, which for
him also means their materiality. Idealism, which Adorno thinks exhibits
the logic of identity, withdraws from such particularity and constructs
unreaJ essences.
3
Derrida defines difference primarily in terms of the functioning of
language, expressing the irreducible spatiotemporality of language. The
sign signifies, has meaning, by its place in the chain of signs, by differing
from other signs. Any moment of signification also defers, holds in
abeyance, any completion of its meaning. Any utterance has a multiplicity
of meanings and directions of interpretation and development in which it
can be taken. For Derrida, the metaphysics of presence seeks to detempora-
lii.e and despatialii.e this signifying process, the of
present meaning which eliminates tt_ie referen_ual rela!1on .. This 1s idealism;
conceiving the being and truth ofthmgs as Jymg outside time and change.
Kristeva more often uses the tenn heterogeneity than difference, but
like Derrida and Adorno she suggests that a logic of identity represses
heterogeneity, which she associates with the body as well as language.
She too focuses on language and the process of signification, especially
the speaking subject. The subject is never a unity, but always process,
for J(rlsteva, producing meaning through the play between the and
.fiprdt e, and musical aspects that any speech simultane-
ously cames. s
The Ideal of Community andthe Politics of Difference 305
Along with such writers as Anthony Giddens and Dall ma yr, l
think the critique of the metaphysics of presence the cla_1m need
to attend to the irreducibility of difference have important 1mphcat1ons for
social philosophy and social theory.
6
I will argue the ideal of co'!1mu-
nity exhibits the desire for unity these writers. fi nd m of
presence. Community usually appears as one side of a m which
individualism is the opposite pole, but as with any such each
side is determined by its relation to the other. I argue that the ideal of
community exhibits a totalizing impulse and denies difference two
primary ways. First, it denies the difference within and between
Second, in pri vileging face-to-face relations it seeks a model of social
relations that are not mediated by space and time distancing. In radically
opposing the inauthentic social relations of alienated society with the
authentic social relations of community, moreover, it detemporalizes the
process of social change into a static before and after structure.
The Opposition between Individualism and Community
Critics of liberalism frequently invoke a conception of community to
project an alternative to the individualism and abstract formalism they
attribute to liberalism.
7
This alternative social ontology rejects the image
of persons as separate and self-contained atoms, each with the same formal
rights, the rights to keep others out, separate. In the idea of community,
critics of liberalism find a social ontology which sees the attributes of a
person as coeval with the society in which he or she lives.
For such writers, the ideal of community evokes the absence of the self-
interested competitiveness of modern society. In this ideal of community,
critics of liberalism find an alternative to the abstract, formal methodology
of liberalism. Existing in community with others entails more than merely
respecting their rights, but rather attending to and sharing in the particular-
ity of their needs and interests.
For example, in his critique of Rawls, Michael Sandel argues that
liberalism's emphasis on the primacy of justice presupposes a self as an
antecedent unity existing prior to its desires and goals, whole unto itself,
separated and bounded. This is an unreal and incoherent conception of
the self, he argues, better replaced by a constitutive conception of self as
the product of an identity it shares with others, all of whom mutually
understand and affinn one another. This constitutive conception of self is
expressed by the concept of community.
And insofar as our constitutive self-understandings comprehend a wider
subject than the individual alone, whether a family or a tribe or a city
or class or nation or people, to this extent they define a community in
the constitutive sense. And what marks such a community is not merely
anon Young
or of communitarian values, or
discourse and na en s . but a common vocabulary of
within which t a of implicit practices and understandings
1
f . opacity of persons ts reduced if never finally dissolved
ar as JUSllce depends its pre-eminence on the
of J?Crsons m the cognitive sense, its priority would
minis as that opacity faded and those community values deepened. 8
In po_litical discussion, for the most part, the ideal of
community m way response to the individualism perceived
as the_preva1hng .. cal and the alienation and fragmentation
perceived as the of society. Community appears, that
as, as pan of an oppos1t1on, md1vidualism/community separated self/
shan:d self. In this opposition each term comes to be by its negative
to_ other, thus in a logical dependency. I suggest that
this opposataon. however, rs mtegral to modem political theory and is not
an alternative to it .
The opposition individualism/community receives one of its expressions
in bourgeois culture in the opposition between masculinity and femininity.
The culture identifies masculinity with the values associated with individu-
alism-self-sufficiency, competition. separation, the formal equality of
rights. The culture identifies femininity, on the other hand, with the values
associated with community-affective relations of care, mutual aid, and
cooperation.
Carol Gilligan has recently posed this opposition between masculine
and feminine in tenns of the opposition between two orientations on moral
reasoning.
9
The .. ethic of rights" that Gilligan takes to be typical of
masculine thinking emphasizes the separation of selves and the sense of
fair play necessary to mediate the competition among such separated
selves. The "ethic of care," on the other hand, which she takes to be
typical of feminine thinking, emphasizes relatedness among persons and
is an ethic of sympathy and affective attention to particular needs, rather
than formal measuring of each according to universal rules. This ethic of
care expresses the relatedness of the ideal of community as opposed to
the atomistic formalism of liberal individualism.
1be opposition between individualism and commu?ity, is homol_o-
gous with and often implies the opposition public/
private, "8lculative/affective, which are also pres-
ent ia modem political thinking.
10
This thankmg has always the
fim& side of these oppositions more highly than the second, 1t has
pq>Vided them with a dominant institutional expression in the society. For
..,._ auerdna the value of community over individualism. the
ave the masculine. the aesthetic over the instrumental, the
The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference I 307
relational over the competitive, does have some critical force with respect
to the dominant ideology and social relations. The oppositions themselves,
however, arise from and belong to bourgeois culture, and for that reason
merely reversing their valuation does not constitute a genuine alternative
to capitalist patriarchal society.
Like most such oppositions, moreover, individualism and community
have a common logic underlying their polarity, which makes it possible
for them to define each other negatively. Each entails a denial of difference
and desire to bring multiplicity and heterogeneity into unity, although in
opposing ways. Liberal individualism denies difference by positing the
self as a solid, self-sufficient unity, not defined by or in need of anything
or anyone other than itself. Its fonnalistic ethic of rights denies difference
by leveling all such separated individuals under a common measure of
rights . Community, on the other hand, denies difference by positing fusion
rather than separation as the social ideal. Community proponents conceive
the social subject as a relation of unity composed by identification and
symmetry among individuals within a totality. As Sandel puts it, the
opacity of persons tends to dissolve as ends, vocabulary, and practices
become identical . This represents an urge to see persons in unity with
each other in a shared whole.
As is the case with many dichotomies, in this one the possibilities for
social ontology and social relations appear to be exhausted in the two
categories. For many writers. the rejection of individualism logically
entails asserting community, and conversely any rejection of community
entails that one necessarily supports individualism. In their discussion of
the debate between Elshtain and Ehrenreich, for example, Sara Evans and
Harry Boyte claim that Ehrenreich promotes individualism because she
rejects the appeal to community that Elshtain makes.
11
The possibility that
there could be other conceptions of social organization does not appear
because all possibilities have been reduced to the mutually exclusive
opposition between individualism and community.
Ultimately, however, for most radical theorists the hard opposition of
individualism and community breaks down. Unlike reactionary appeals
to community which consistently assert the subordination of individual
aims and values to the collective, most radical theorists assert that commu-
nity itself consists in the respect for and fulfillment of individual aims and
capacities. The neat distinction between individualism and community
thus generates a dialectic in which each is a condition for the other.
Denying DilTerence within and between Subjects
In her interpretation of Marx's ontology, Carol Gould fonnulates such
a dialectical conception of community as the transcended synthesis of
308 I Iris Marion Young
sociality and individuality. This ideal society of the future. is realized as
the third stage of process of social evolution. The first stage is.a communal
society in which the individual is subjected to the collect1ve, and the
second is the individualist society of capitalist alienation.
The separate subjects who are related to each other only as objects,
namely, as beings for another, now recognize themselves in these
objects, or recognize these objects as like themselves. Therefore they
recognize each other as subjects, and the unity between subjects and
objects is reestablished in this recognition. The subjects are then related
to each other not as alien external others, but as aspects of a common
species subject. The relations are therefore internal , since they are the
interrelations within this common or communal subject which is now
no longer made up of discrete individuals in external relations, but
rather of individuals who are unified in their common subjectivity. . . .
The subjects are therefore mutually interdependent and the relations
between them are internal because each subject is what it is-a sub-
ject-through its relation to the other, namely, through being recog-
nized as a subject by the other. These individuals therefore form a
communal but differentiated subject that expresses itself in and through
each individual . The whole or unity that is reconstituted in these internal
relations among the individuals is thus mediated or differentiated by
their individuality, but unified by their commonality.
12
According to Derrida, dialectical logic represses difference not by
bringing multiplicity under a simple universal but by putting closure on
the process of exteriorization. This closure emerges in the concept of a
whole or totality within which opposites, differences, are reconciled and
balanced.
13
Like many other expressions of this ideal of community,
Gould's conception of community works on and through a totalizing desire
to reconcile the differences of subjects.
The communitarian ideal participates in the metaphysics of presence
because it conceives that subjects no longer need be exterior to one
another. They need no longer outrun one another in directions they do
not mutually understand and affirm. The ideal, moreover, extends this
mutuality to its conception of the good society as a telos, an end to the
conflict and violence of human interaction. Community here is conceived
as a totality in two ways. It has no ontological exterior, since it realizes
the unity of general will and individual subjectivity. It also has no historical
exterior. for there is no further stage to travel.
While she does not specifically speak of her ideal as community,
Benhabib expresses a similar ideal of person relating to one another
through reciprocal recognition of subjectivities as a particular standpoint
af moral autonomy. Liberalism holds a conception of moral autonomy,
The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference I 309
what she calls the "standpoint of the_generalized other," which
from the difference, desires and feeling among to regard a h t
shari ng a common set of formal rights and contrast,
Benhabib calls the "standpoint of the concrete other views each pe
in his or her concrete indi vidual ity.
In assuming this standpoint, we abstract from what continues ou.r com-
monality and seek to understand the other as he/she
herself. We seek to comprehend the needs of the other, mouva-
.tions, what they search for and what they desire. to
other is governed by the norm of complementary each 1s
entitled to expect and assume from the other forms of t?r?ugh
which the other feels recognized and confirmed as a
being with specific needs, talents and capacities.

differences m this
case complement rather than exclude one another.
Benhabib's notion of the standpoint of the concrete other expresses
community as the mutual and reciprocal understanding of persons,
internally, as Gould puts it, rather than externally. Many other wnters
express a similar ideal of relating to other persons internally, understanding
them from their point of view. In the quotation previously cited, Sandel
poses the elimination of the opacity of other persons as the ideal for
community. Isaac Bal bus represents the goal of radical politics and the
establishment of community as the overcoming of the "otherness" of
other fo reciprocal recognition. s Roberto Unger articulates the ideal of
community as the political alternative to personal love. ln community
persons relate to one another as concrete individuals who recognize them-
selves in each other because they have shared purposes. The conflict
between the demands of individuality and the demands of sociability
disappears in mutual sympathy.
16
Dorothy Allison proposes an ideal of
community for feminists that is characterized by a "shared feeling of
belonging and merging," with an "ecstatic sense of oneness."
17
All formulations seek to understand community as a unification
of particular persons through the sharing of subjectivities: Persons will
cease to be opaque, other, not understood, and instead become fused
mutually sympa!hetic, understanding one another as they understand them:
selves. Such an idea! of subj.ectivity, or the transparency of subjects
to another, demes difference m the sense of the basic asymmetry of
subjects. As first brought to focus and Sartre's analysis deepened,
persons necessanly transcend each because subjectivity is negativity.
The regard of the other upon me lS always objectifying. Other persons
never. see the world from my perspective, and I am always faced with an
expenence of myself! do not have in witnessing the other's objective
grasp of my body, actions, and words.
3 10 I Iris Marion Young
This mutual transcendence, of course, makes sharing
between possible, a fact that Sartre notices less than Hegel. The sharing,
?owever, 1s never complete mutual understandi ng and reciprocity. Shar-
ing, moreover, is fragile. The other person may at the next moment
understand my words differently from the way I meant them or carry my
actions to consequences I do not intend. The same difference that makes
sharing between possible also makes misunderstanding, rejection, with-
drawal, and conflict always possible conditions of social being.
The notion that each person can understand the other as he or she
or herself, moreover, that persons can know other
subjects m their concrete needs and desires, presupposes that a subject
can kn?w himself or herself and express that knowledge accurately and
unambiguously to others. Such a concept of self-knowledge retains the
Cartesian understanding of subjectivity basic to the modern metaphysics
of presence. The idea of the self as a unified subject of desire and need
and an origin of assertion and action has been powerfully called into
question by contemporary philosophers.
18
I will rely on my reading of
Julia Kristeva.
Without elaborating the linguistic detail in which she couches her
notion of the subject-in-process, I will summarize briefly the general idea.
Kristeva relies on a psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious to assert
that subjectivity is heterogeneous and decentered. Consciousness, mean-
ing, and intention are only possible because the subject-in-process slips
and surpasses its intentions and meanings. Any utterance, for example,
not only has a literal meaning, but is laden with ambiguities, embodied
in gesture, tone of voice, and rhythm that all contribute to the heterogeneity
of its meaning without being intended. So it is with actions and interactions
with other persons. What I say and do always has a multiplicity of
meanings, ambiguities, plays, and these are not always coherent.
19
Because the subject is not a unity, it cannot be present to itself and
know itself. I do not always know what I mean, need, want, desire,
because these do not arise from some ego as origin. Often I express my
desire in gesture or tone of voice, without meaning to do so. Conscious-
ness, speech, expressiveness are possible only if the subject always sur-
passes itself and is thus necessarily unable to comprehend itself. Subjects
aJJ have multiple desires that do not cohere; they attach layers of meanings
to objects without always being aware of each layer or their connections.
Consequently, any individual subject is a play of differences that cannot
be comprehended.
If the subject is heterogeneous process, unable to be present to itself,
then it foJJows that subjects cannot make themselves transparent, wholly
present to one another. If each subject escapes its own comprehension and
for that reason cannot fully express to another its needs and desires,
The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference I 31 l
then necessarily each subject also escapes sympathetic comprehension by
others. I cannot understand another as he or she understands himself or
herself because he or she does not completely understand himself or
herself'. Indeed, because other people's expression to me may outrun their
own awareness or intention, I may understand certain aspects of them
more fully than they. . . . ,,
Gould appeals to such an ideal of "common .as an alt.em.a-
live to the commodification of persons she finds charactensuc of cap1tahst
domination. Her conceptualization suggests that only if persons under-
stood one another "internally," as she puts it, would such domination be
eliminated. While I certainly do not wish to deny that current social
relations are full of domination and exploitation, conceiving the elimina-
tion of these conditions in terms of an impossible ideal of shared subjectiv-
ity can tend to deflect attention from more concrete analysis of the condi-
tions of their elimination.
Not only does this ideal of shared subjectivity express an impossibility,
but it has undesirable political implications. Political theorists and activists
should distrust this desire for reciprocal recognition and identification with
others, I suggest, because it denies difference in the concrete sense of
making it difficult for people to respect those with whom they do not
identify. I suggest that the desire for mutual understanding and reciprocity
underlying the ideal of community is similar to the desire for identification
that underlies racial and ethnic chauvinism.
In ordinary speech for most people in the United States, the term
community refers to the people with whom I identify in a locale. lt refers
to neighborhood, church, school. It also carries connotations of ethnicity
or race. For most people in the United States, insofar as they consider
themselves n:iember.s of communities at all, a community is a group that
shares a specific hentage, a common self-identification, a common culture
and set of norms. In the United States today, identification as a member
of such a community also often occurs as an oppositional differentiation
from groups, who are feared or at best devalued. Persons identify
only wath. some other persons, feel in community only with those, and
the difference confront them with because they identify with
a different culture, history, and point of view on the world.
Racism, chauvinism, devaluation, l suggest, grow
partly from a desire for community, that 1s, from the desire to understand
others as they understand themselves and from the desire to be understood
as I understand myself. Practically speaking, such mutual understanding
can be only within a homogeneous group that defines itself
by common attributes. Such identification, however, entails
to excluded. In the dynamics of racism and ethnic
chauv1msm m the Umted States today, the positive identification of some
312 I Iris Marion Young
groups is often achieved by first defining other as the other, t?e
devalued semihuman. I do not claim that appeal to the ideal of community
is itself racist. Rather, my claim is that such appeals, within the context
of a racist and chauvinistic society, can validate the impulses that repro-
duce racist and ethnically chauvinistic identification.
The striving for mutual identification and shared understanding among
those who seek to foster a radical and progressive politics, moreover, can
and has led to denying or suppressing differences within political groups
or movements. Many feminist groups, for example, have sought to foster
relations of equality and reciprocity of understanding in such a way that
disagreement, difference, and deviation have been interpreted as a breech
of sisterhood, the destruction of personal relatedness and community.
There has often been strong pressure within women's groups for members
to share the same understanding of the world and the same lifestyle, in
addition to distributing tasks equally and rotating leadership. Such pressure
has often led to group and even more movement homogeneity-primarill.
straight, or primarily lesbian, or primarily white, or primarily academic.
1
In recent years feminists, perhaps more seriously than other progressive
political groups, have discussed how their organizations and movement
might become more heterogeneous and recognize difference. A continuing
desire for mutual identification and reciprocity, however. hampers the
implementation of a principled call for heterogeneity.
In a racist, sexist, homophobic society that has despised and devalued
certain groups, it is necessary and desirable for members of those groups
to adhere with one another and celebrate a common culture, heritage, and
experience. Even with such separatist movements, however, too strong a
desire for unity can lead to repressing the differences within the group or
forcing some out: gays and lesbians from black nationalist groups, for
example, or feminists from Native American groups, and so on.
Many other progressive political organizations and movements founder
on the same desire for community. Too often people in political groups
take mutual friendship to be a goal of the group and thus find themselves
wanting as a group when they do not achieve such commonality.
22
Such
a desire for community often channels energy away from the political
goals of the group and also produces a clique atmosphere which
groups small and turns potential members away. A more acceptable poli-
tics would acknowledge that members of an organization do not understand
one another as they understand themselves and would accept this distance
without closing it into exclusion.
Denial of Difference as Time and Space Distancing
Many political theorists who put forward an ideal of community specify
small-group, face-to-face relations as essential to the realization of that
The Ideal o; Community and the Politics of Difference I 313
f th ideal of community that
ideal. Peter Manicas expresses a o e
includes this face-to-face specification.
. . . h. h ons are in face-to-face contact,
Consider an assoc1at10n
10
w ic pers d. t d by "authorities "
but where the relations of persons are not me

.e .
sanctified rules reified bureaucracies or commod1t1es. Each IS
to absorb the reasoning and ideas of
posi tion to do so. Their relations, thus, are open, 1mme ia ea . . ti
cal. Further' the total conditions of their lives are to be
determined with each having an equal vmce and equal power.
these conditions are satisfied and when as a resul.t,. t.he
and fruits of their associated and independent acuv.1ues are perceived
and consciously become an object of individual desire and effort, then
there is a democratic community.
23
Roberto Unger argues that community requires face-to-face interaction
among members within a plurality of contexts. other people
and to be understood by them in our concrete md1v1duahty, we must. not
only work together but play together, take care of children gneve
together, and so on.
24
Christian Bay envisions the good society as
upon small face-to-face of direct ?emocracy
interaction.
25
Michael Taylor specifies that m a commumty, relations
among members must be direct and many-sided. 1;-ike Manicas, he
that relations are direct only when they are unmed1ated by representatives,
leaders, bureaucrats, state institutions, or codes.
26
While Gould does not
specify face-to-face relations as necessary, some of her language suggests
that community can only be realized in such face-to-face relations. ln the
institutionalization of democratic socialism, she says, "social combination
now becomes the immediate subjective relations of mutuality among
individuals. The relations, again become personal relations as in the pre-
capitalist stage, but no longer relations of domination and no longer
mediated, as in the second stage, by external objects."
27
I take there to be several problems with the privileging of face-to-face
relations by theorists of community. lt presumes an illusory ideal of
unmediated social relations and wrongly identifies mediation with alien-
ation. It denies difference in the sense of time and space distancing. It
implies a model of the good society as consisting of decentralized small
units, which is both unrealistic and politically undesirable. Finally, it
avoids the political question of the relation among the decentralized com-
munities.
All the writers cited previously give primacy to face-to-face presence
because they claim that only under those conditions can the social relations
be immediate. I understand them to mean several things by social relations
that are immediate. They are direct, personal relations, in which each
I
\
i
314 I Iris Marion Young
understands the other in her or his individuality. This is an extension of
the ideal of mutual understanding I have criticized in the previous section.
also here n:ieans relations of co-presence in which persons
expenence s1multane1ty of speaking and hearing and are in the same
space . is, have .the to move close enough to touch.
28
llu_s ideal of the 1mmed1ate presence of subjects to one another how-
ever. 1s a metaphysical illusion. Even a face-to-face relation two
people is mediated by voice and gesture, spacing and temporality. As
soon. as a third person enters the interaction, the possibility arises of the
relation between the first two being mediated through the third, and so
The med1at1on.of relations among persons by speech and actions of
still 1s a fundamental condition of sociality. The richness,
creativity. d1vers1ty, and potential of a society expand with growth in the
scope and means of its media, linking persons across time and distance.
The greater the time and distance, however, the greater the number of
persons who stand between other persons.
The normative privileging of face-to-face relations in the ideal of com-
munity seeks to suppress difference in the sense of the time and space
distancing of social processes, which material media facilitate and enlarge.
Such an ideal dematerializes its conception of interaction and institutions.
For all social interaction takes place over time and across space. Social
desire consists in the urge to carry meaning, agency, and the effects of
agency beyond the moment and beyond the place. As laboring subjects
we separate the moment of production from the moment of consumption.
Even societies confined to a limited territory with few institutions and a
small population devise means of their members communicating with one
another over distances, means of maintaining their social relationships
even though they are not face to face. Societies occupy wider and wider
territorial fields and increasingly differentiate their activity in space, time,
and function, a movement that, of course, accelerates and takes on qualita-
tively specific form in modem industrial societies.
29
I suggest that there are no conceptual grounds for considering
face relations more pure, authentic social relations than relations mediated
across time and distance. For both face-to-face and non-face-to-face rela-
tions are mediated relations, and in both there is as much the possibility
of separation and violence as there is communication and
Theorists of community are inclined to I
suggest, because they wrongly identify mediation and alienation.
By alienation, I mean a in do not have control
either over their actions the cond1t1ons of their actwn, or the consequences
of their action, due to the intervention of other agen.ts.
30
Social
is a condition for the possibility of alienation in this . s_ense; media
possible the intervention of agents between the cond1t1ons of a subject s
The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference I 315
action and the action or between a subject's action and its consequences.
Thus, media make domination and exploitation possible. In modem soci-
ety the primary structures creating alienation and domination are bureau-
cracy and commoditication of all aspects of human activity. including and
especially labor. Both bureaucracy and commodification of social relations
depend on complex. structures of mediation among a large number of
persons.
That mediation is a necessary condition of alienation, however, does
not entail the reverse implication: That only by eliminating structures of
mediation do we eliminate alienation. If temporal and spatial distancing
are basic to social processes, and if persons always mediate between other
persons to generate social networks, then a society of immediacy is
impossible. While mediation may be a necessary condition for alienation,
it is not sufficient . Alienation is that specific process of mediation in which
the actions of some serve the ends of others without reciprocation and
without being explicit, and this requires coercion and domination.
By positing a society of immediate face-to-face relations as ideal,
community theorists generate a dichotomy between the "authentic" society
of the future and the "inauthentic" society we live in, which is character-
ized only by alienation, bureaucratization, and degradation. Such a dichot-
omization between the inauthentic society we have and the authentic
society of community, however, detemporalizes our understanding of
social change. On this understanding, social change and revolution consist
in the complete negation of this society and the establishment of the truly
good society. In her scheme of social evolution, Gould conceives of "the
society of the future" as the negated sublation of capitalist society. This
understands history not as temporal process but as divided into two static
structures: the before of alienated society and the after of community.
The projection of the ideal of community as the radical other of existing
society denies difference in the sense of the contradictions and ambiguities
of social life. Instead of dichotomizing the pure and the impure into two
stages of history or two kinds of social relations, a liberating politics
should conceive the social process in which we move as a multiplicity
of actions and structures which cohere and contradict, some of them
exploitative and some of them liberating. The polarization between the
impure, inauthentic society we live in and the pure, authentic society we
seek to institute detemporalizes the process of change because it fails to
articulate how we move from one to the other. If institutional change is
possible at all, it must begin from intervening in the contradictions and
tensions of existing society. No telos of the final society exists, moreover;
society understood as a moving and contradictory process implies that
change for the better is always possible and always necessary.
The requirement that genuine community embody face-to-face rela-
tions, when taken as a model of the good society, carries a specific vision
of social organization. Since the ideal of community demands that relations
between members be direct and many-sided, the ideal society is composed
of small locales, populated by a small enough number of persons so that
each can be personally acquainted with all the others. For most writers
this that the ideal social organization is decent.ralized, with
scale and local markets. Each community aims for economic self-
suffic1ency, and each democratically makes its own decisions about how
to organize its working and playing life.
I do not doubt the desirability of small groups in which individuals have
personal acquaintance with one another and interact in a plurality of
contexts. Just as the intimacy of living with a few others in the same
household has unique dimensions that are humanly valuable, so existing
with others in communities of mutual friendship has specific characteristics
of wannth and sharing that are humanly valuable. Furthermore, there is
no question that capitalist patriarchal society discourages and destroys
such communities of mutual friendship, just as it squeezes and fragments
families. In our vision of the good society, we surely wish to include
institutional arrangements that would nurture the specific experience of
mutual friendship, which only relatively small groups interacting in a
plurality of contexts can produce. Recognizing the specific value of such
face-to-face relations, however, is quite a different matter from proposing
them as the organizing principle of a whole society.
Such a model of the good society as composed of decentralized, eco-
nomically self-sufficient, face-to-face communities functioning as autono-
mous political entities is both wildly utopian and undesirable. To bring it
into being would require dismantling the urban character of modem soci-
ety, a gargantuan physical overhaul of living space, work places, places
of trade and commerce. A model of a transformed better society must in
some concrete sense begin from the concrete material structures that are
given to us at this time in history, and in the United States these are large-
scale industry and urban centers. The model of society composed of small
communities is not desirable, at least in the eyes of many. If we take
seriously the way many people Jive their lives today, it appears that people
enjoy cities, that is, places where strangers are thrown together. .
One final problem arises from the model of commu?1ty
taken as a political goal. The model of the good soc1ety'as usually arucu-
lated leaves completely unaddressed the question of such. small
communities are to relate to one another. Frequently, the ideal projects a
level of self-sufficiency and decentralization which suggests that propo-
nents envision few relations among the decentralized communities except
.00. of friendly visits. But surely it is unrealistic to assume that such
cooununities need not engage in extensive relations of ex-
change of resources, goods, and culture. Even if one accepts the notion
that a radical restructuring of society in the direction of a just and humane
society entails people living in small democratically organized units of
work and neighborhood, this has not addressed the important political
question: How will the relations among these communities be organized
so as to foster justice and prevent domination? When we raise this political
question the philosophical and practical importance of mediation re-
emerges . Once agai n. politics must be conceived as a relationship of
strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate
sense, relating across time and distance.
City Life and the Politics of Difference
l have claimed that radical politics must begin from historical givens
and conceive radical change not as the negation of the given but rather as
making something good from many elements of the given. The city, as a
vastly populated area with large-scale industry and places of mass assem-
bly, is for us a historical given, and radical politics must begin from the
existence of modem urban life. The material surroundings and structures
available to us define and presuppose urban relationships. The very size
of populations in our society and most other nations of the world, coupled
with a continuing sense of national or ethnic identity with millions of other
people, all support the conclusion that a vision of dismantling the city is
hopelessly utopian.
Starting from the given of modem urban life is not simply necessary,
moreover, it is desirable. Even for many of those who decry the alienation,
massification, and bureaucratization of capitalist patriarchal society, city
life exerts a powerful attraction. Modem literature, art, and film have
celebrated city life, its energy, cultural diversity, technological complex-
ity, and the multiplicity of its activities. Even many of the most staunch
proponents of decentralized community love to show visiting friends
ar?un? the Boston or San Francisco or New York in which they live,
chmbmg .up towers to see the glitter _of lights and sampling the fare at the
best ethmc restaurants. For many people deemed deviant in the closeness
of the community in which they lived, whether .. independent"
women or socJahsts or gay men and lesbians, the city has often offered
a welcome anonymity and some measure of freedom.
31
To be sure the
possibilities of capitalist cities have been fraught with
gu1ty.
Yet, .suggest of .the ideal of community, we begin from
our pos1!1ye of city hfe form a vision of the good society.
Our poht1cal ideal .1s the city. In sketching this ideal, I
assume some matenal premises. We will assume a productivity level in
318 I Iris Marion Young
the society that can meet everyone's needs, and a physical urban environ-
ment that is cleaned up and renovated. We will assume, too, that everyone
who can work has meaningful work and those who cannot are provided
for with dignity. In sketching this ideal of ci ty life, I am concerned to
describe the city as a kind of relationship of people to one another, to their
own history and one another's hi story. Thus, by "city" I am not referring
only to those huge metropolises that we call cities in the United States.
The kinds of relationship I describe obtain also ideall y in those places we
call towns, where perhaps 10,000 or 20,000 people live.
As a process of people's relating to one another, city li fe embodies
difference in all the senses I have discussed in this chapter. The city
obviously exhibits the temporal and spatial distancing and differentiation
that I have argued, the ideal of community seeks to collapse. On the face
of the city environment lies its history and the history of the individuals
and groups that have dwelt within it. Such physical historicity, as well as
the functions and groups that live in the city at any given time, create its
spatial differentiation. The city as a network and sedimentation of dis-
cretely understood places, such as particular buildings, parks, neighbor-
hoods, and as a physical environment offers changes and surprises in
transition from one place to another.
The temporal and spatial differentiation that mark the physical environ-
ment of the city produce an experience of aesthetic inexhaustibility. Build-
ings, squares, the twists and turns of streets and alleys offer an inexhaust-
ible store of individual spaces and things, each with unique aesthetic
characteristics. The juxtaposition of incongruous styles and functions that
usually emerge after a long time in city places contribute to this pleasure
in detail and surprise. This is an experience of difference in the sense of
always being inserted. The modem city is without walls; it is not planned
and coherent. Dwelling in the city means always having a sense of beyond,
that there is much human life beyond my experience going on in or near
these spaces, and I can never grasp the city as a whole.
City life thus also embodies difference as the contrary of the face-to-
face ideal expressed by most assertions of community. City life is the
"being-together" of strangers. Strangers encounter one another, either face
to face or through media, often remaining strangers and yet acknowledging
their contiguity in living and the contributions each makes to the others.
In such encountering people are not "internally" related, as the community
theorists would have it, and do not understand one another from within
their own perspective. They are externally related, they experience each
other as other, different, from different groups, histories, professions,
cukures, which they do not understand.
1be public spaces of the city are both an image of the total relationships
of city life and a primary way those relationships are enacted and experi
:.
,,
"'
The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference I 319
enced. A public space is a place accessible to anyone, people engage
in activity as individuals or in small groups. In publtc pe?ple are
aware of each other's presence and even at times attend to 1t. In a city there
are a multitude of such public spaces: streets, restaurants.' concert halls,
parks. In such public spaces the of the residents come to-
gether and dwell side by side, sometimes apprec1atmg one.another, enter-
taining one another, or just chatting, always to go agam as strangers.
City parks as we now experience .often this character. .
City life implies a social exhaus1Ib1hty quite different from the of
the face-to-face community in which there is mutual and
group identification and loyalty. The city consists in a great of
people and groups, with a multitude of subcultures differentiated
activities and functions whose Jives and movements mingle and overlap
in public spaces. belong to distinct groups or cultures and interact
in neighborhoods and work places. They venture out fr?m these
however, to publ ic places of entertainment, consumption, and pohhcs.
They witness one another's cultures and functions in such public interac-
tion, without adopting them as their own. The appreciation of ethnic foods
or professional musicians, for example, consists in the recognition that
these transcend the familiar everyday world of my life.
In the city strangers live side by side in public places, giving to and
receiving from one another social and aesthetic products, often mediated
by a huge chain of interactions. This instantiates social relations as differ-
ence in the sense of an understanding of groups and cultures that are
different, with exchanging and overlapping interactions that do not issue
in community, yet which prevent them from being outside of one another.
The social differentiation of the city also provides a positive inexhaustibil-
ity of human relations. The possibility always exists of becoming ac-
quainted with new and different people, with different cultural and social
experiences; the possibility always exists for new groups to form or emerge
around specific interests.
The unoppressive city is thus defined as openness to unassimilated
otherness. Of course, we do not have such openness to difference in our
social relation.s. I am asserting an ideal, which consists in a politics
of difference. Assummg that group differentiation is a given of social life
for us, how can the relationships of group identities embody justice,
and the abse?ce of The among group
and society 1s blotted by racism, sexism, xenopho-
bia, mockery. A politics of difference lays
d?wn means for recognizing and affirming
dtffen:ntly 1dent1fy1?g groups m two basic senses: giving political repre-
sentation. group .mterests and celebrating the distinctive cultures and
charactenst1cs of different groups.
-'LU / ms Manon Young
Many questions arise in proposing a politics of difference. What defines
a group tha_t deserves and celebration? How does one provide
to group mterests that avoids the mere pluralism of liberal
groups? What are institutional forms by which the mediations of
the city and the representations of its groups in decision making can be
democratic? These questions, as well as many others, confront the
ideal_ of unoppressive city. They are not dissimilar from questions of the
relat10nsh1ps that ought to exist among communities. They are questions,
however, appeal to community as the ideal of social life appears to
repress or ignore. Some might claim that a politics of difference does
express what the ideal of community ought to express, despite the meaning
that many writers give the concept of community. Fred Dallmayr, for
example, reserves the term community for just this openness toward unas-
similated otherness, designating the more totalistic understanding of social
relations I have criticized as either "communalism" or "movement."
As opposed to the homogeneity deliberately fostered in the movement,
the communitarian mode cultivates diversity-but without encouraging
willful segregation or the repressive preponderance of one of the social
subsectors . . .. Community may be the only fonn of social aggregation
which reflects upon, and makes room for, otherness or the reverse
side of subjectivity (and inter-subjectivity) and thus for the play of
difference-the difference between ego and Other and between man
and nature.
33
.
In the end it may be a matter of stipulation whether one chooses t? call
such politics as play of difference "community." most
tions of the ideal of community carry the urge to umty I have
however, I think it is less confusing to use a tenn other than
rather than to redefine the tenn. Whatever the label, the of_soc_1al
relations that embody openness to unassimilated with Justice
. . d t be developed Radical pohllcs, moreover, must
and appreciation nee s o . . fi d
develop discourse and institutions for identl e groups
together without suppressing or subsuming the differences.
Notes
I.
. - "fi II as a normative ideal designating how
I examme _community spec1 ca . y There are various nonnonnative uses
social relations to be does not apply. Sociologists
of the term to w_h1c my le usuall use the tenn to mean
engaged in community stud1:s, .. they use the tenn
something like town or neig fons apply to community
primarily in a descnpt1ve Thode social organization. See Jessie
understood only as a normative m e
I
I
I
The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference I 32l
Bernard, The Sociology of Community, (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and
Co., 1973) for a summary of different sociological theories of community in
its nonnormative senses.
2. The texts of these authors I am relying on primarily are Jacques Derrida,
Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976);
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum Publishing
Company, 1973); Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977).
These three writers have a similar critique of Western metaphysics. Several
writers have noted similarities between Adorno and Derrida in this regard.
See Fred Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Struc-
turalist Theory of Politics (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1981), pp. 107-14, 127-36; and Michael Ryan, Marxism and Decon-
struction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 73-
81 . For an account that draws some parallel between Kristeva and Adorno
in this respect, see Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell, "Feminism,
Negativity and lntersubjectivity ," Praxis International, vol. 5, no. 4, 1986,
pp. 484-504. My account of metaphysics of presence is based on my
reading of these three writers, but I do not claim to be "representing" what
they say. Nor in this chapter am I claiming to appropriate all these writers say
for social theory. While I do regard the critique of the ideal of community I
engage in here loosely as a deconstructive critique along the lines of Derri-
da's method, I part ways with him and some of the other poststructuralists
insofar as I think that it is both possible and necessary to pose alternative
conceptualizations. Doing so is, of course, always a positing, and hence
excludes and demarks, thus always itself open to the possibility 'of decon-
structive critique.
3. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Part Two, pp. 134-210.
4. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 12-87.
5. Kristeva, "Le sujet en proces," "L'experience.et la pratique," "Matiere,
sense, dialectique," Polylogue pp. 55-136, 263-86.
6. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1979), pp. 28-40; Dallmayr, Twilight of
Subjectivity, pp. 107-115.
7. R. P. Wolff, The Poverty of liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978),
Chapter 5.
8. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1982), pp. 172-173.
9. Carol Gilligan, Jn a Different Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981).
10. I develop more thoroughly the implications of these oppositions in modern
political theory and practice and a practical vision of their unsettling in my
paper "Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist
Critics of Modem Political Theory," Praxis International, vol. 5, no. 4,
1986, pp. 381-40 I.
322 I Iris Marion Young
11. Harry C. Boyte and Sara M. Evans, "Strategies in Search of America:
Cultural Radicalism, Populism, and Democratic Culture," Socialist Review
(May to August 1984), pp. 73- 100.
12. Carol Gould, Marx's Social Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978),
p. 9.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21 .
22.
23.
Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, pp. 65- 71.
Seyla Benhabib, "Communicative Ethics and Moral Autonomy, " presented
at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division,
December 1982; see also ''The Generalized and Concrete Other: Toward a
Feminist Critique of Substitutionalist Universalism," Praxis International,
Vol. 5, No. 4, 1986, pp. 402-424.
Isaac Balbus, Marxism and Domination (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983).
Roberto Mangabcira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: The Free
Press, 1975), pp. 220-222.
Dorothy Alison, "Weaving the Web of Community," Quest: A Feminist
Quarterly, vol. 4, 1978, p. 79.
Sandel, in Liberalism and the limits of Justice, levels a powerful critique
against Rawls by arguing that his theory of justice a se.lf. as
separated from and prior to the it as its unified ongm.
Sandel gives several arguments showmg the mcoh.erence of such a concep-
tion of the unified self prior to the context of actmn.
Kristcva, "Le sujet en proces," Polylogue, pp. 55-106.
Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason is a classic on dynamic
of inclusion and exclusion. For another statement refe'!1_ng specifically to
the exclusionary aspects of attempts to commumttes, see
Moss Kantner, Commitment and Community: Communes l!top1as m
Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Umversaty Press,
1972), pp. 52-53.
Francine Rainone, "Community, Politics and Spirituality," paper
at a conference on Feminism and Psychology, Boston,
Jana Sawicki, "Foucault and Feminism: Towards a Poht1cs of Difference,
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol._ I, no. 2, 1986, pp.
36. See also Audre Lorde, essays in Sister Outsider, NY.
11Jc Crossin Press, 1984), especially '"Ole Masters Tools W_1ll Never
Dismantle th! Master's House," and "Age, Race, Class and Sex. Women
Redefining Difference."
w Breines documents this urge to mutual friendship and of the
inbnents that followed from it in student an the 1960s
in .rboot Community and Organization m the New_ left. 1962-68 (South
Hadley, MA: J. F. Bergin Publishers, 1982), especially Chapter 4.
Pecer .M.anicas, Th6 Death of IM State (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1974),
p w.
The Ideal of Community and rhe Pol itics of Difference I 323
24. Unger, Knowledge and Politics, pp. 262-63.
25. Christian Bay, Strategies of Political Emancipation (South Bend, IL: Notre
Dame Press, 1981), Chapters 5 and 6.
26. Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 27- 28.
27. Gould, Marx's Social Ontology, p. 26.
28. Derrida discusses the illusory character of this ideal of immediate presence
of subjects to one another in community in his discussion of Levi-Strauss
and Rousseau. See Of Grammatology, pp. IOl - 140.
29. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, pp. 198-233.
30. For a useful account of al ienation, see Richard Schmitt, Alienation and
Class (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co. , I 983), especially
Chapter 5. In this book Schmitt, like many other of the writers I have cited,
takes community to stand as the negation of !he society of alienation. Unlike
those writers discussed in this section, however, he does not take face-to-
face relations as a condition of communiry. To the degree that he makes a
pure/impure distinction and exhibits the desire for unity I have criticized,
however, the critique articulated here applies to Schmitt's appeal to the
ideal of community.
31 . Marshall Berman presents a fascinating account of the attractions of city
life inAllThatlsSolidMeltslntoAir(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
George Shulman points to the open-endedness of city life as contrasted with
the pastoral vision of community in ''The Pastoral Idyll of Democracy,"
Democracy, vol. 3, 1983, pp. 43-54; for a similar critique, sec David
Plotke, "Democracy, Modernization, and Democracy," Socialist Review,
vol. 14, March-April 1984, pp. 31-56.
32. In my previously cited paper, "Impartiality and the Civic Public," I fonnu-
late some ideas of a heterogeneous public life; I have developed further
some principles of a politics of difference in "Elements of a Politics of
Difference," paper presented at the North American Society for Social
Philosophy, Colorado Springs, August 1985.
33. Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity, pp. 142-143.